


Steel Petals

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-14
Updated: 2015-02-14
Packaged: 2018-03-12 09:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3351791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So I asked the universe if I could maybe get a story for Valentine's Day, for all the people who feel alone and awful on this day.  This is what I got.  If no one's ever given you anything on Valentine's Day, this is for you.  </p>
<p>Prose so purple it may alter your eye color.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steel Petals

Crystal City had no graveyard. No one had died in so long, not since finding Theophany, and they'd decided, when they'd settled the place, that they were to be a city devoted to life, not death.  
  
And so they stood around the catafalque where Wing lay, each feeling as though some deep string had been plucked buzz-vibrating against their spark, riven by loss, and unsure.  
  
"Space," Axe had said, finally, his voice a gravelly rumble that cut through the despair. "We should send him to space."  
  
Only Dai Atlas would have feared it was exile. To everyone who knew Wing, knew and cherished him, this felt right. It felt fitting and beautiful, and the day the small pod had launched from the newly unearthed Crystal City, Axe had spoken again, his rich voice heavy as he looked up to the white feathery streak on the blue sky, murmuring, as he rubbed a newly-raised repair weld on the back of his hand, "He was always an explorer."  
  
***  
  
Drift wasn't an explorer. He had left the _Lost Light_ with no mission other than to escape, to bear the burden of his and Rodimus's failure. Rodimus was his friend, and Drift...would do anything for his friends. It hadn't felt right, but then, nothing had felt right for Drift, nothing in a long time, and he'd wondered, long before he'd taken the beaten-up shuttle off the larger ship, aiming its nose to the blankest span of starlessness, if that was to be his destiny. The never right, the always slightly off, the facade.  
  
He had no purpose, but to leave, taking all the burden of the Overlord fiasco with him, and it swamped him for days, all the failures, big and small, of his life filling the small shuttle, fetid and dense, until the air seemed unbreathable, the walls seemed saturated with it. So he'd found a mission, or at least an aim, in bringing some measure of justice to the universe. The mechs he caught would not stop, would not listen, intent on pursuing war even beyond the verge of war. It was over, and he'd tried to tell them that, but they had, he realized, nothing else to cling to, nothing to see or do or make of the world, except war and death, so they'd turned their faces and sparks away from the golden glow of hope, the hollow, terrifying ring of having to forge one's own destiny, and buried themselves in the familiarity of bodies and pain.  
  
Drift buried himself in it, too, in his attempt at justice, but he knew it, knew it was a blind, futile escape, and maybe--maybe--that made a difference.  
  
But destiny knew, as it always had, Drift could not escape. Not so easily.  
  
***  
  
He'd found the pod by accident, pulled awake by a proximity alarm from a recharge strewn with nightmares. You'd expect his dreams to be poisoned with death, violence, the horrors of war he'd glutted in, exulted in, for all those years, but his nightmares were far worse: alone, meaningless, desolate, wrong.  
  
He'd been too addled with sleep to process much beyond the Cybertronian writing--the old script, something he'd learned to read, haltingly, since Crystal City, but nothing seemed to strike home, to get through, until his fingers found the catches and the pod's upper half clamshelled open and....  
  
...the smell hit him first, spicy and sweet, rich and clean. He'd known that smell, himself, a scent of cleanness and safety and beauty he couldn't raise his optics to. It seemed to shake the ground around him, dissolving and resolvng, for half a klik, to there, to _him_.  
  
"Wing." The word broke the months-long silence of the shuttle, his voice tasting of rust and electrons. Wing, there, here, hands gently folded over his chassis, smooth and bright and new, his face set in lines so serene Drift's spark ached. Even in death, Wing was happy, happier than Drift.  
  
It made sense. Wing deserved happiness, and Drift had repaid him with...this.  
  
Around the jet's stilled form, covering him, dappling over his legs, his shoulders, lay dozens--hundreds--of little metal sheets. Petals, almost, small and curved, and the soft grey of primered armor.  
  
They were armor, Drift realized, little bits cut from the mechs of Crystal City, tributes to their fallen hero, their lost saint. He picked one up, feeling its lightness, too light by far to carry a burden of grief, hearing it tink against his fingers. There was writing on it, a small inscription, and for a moment, Drift turned his face away, optics burning with something like shame. It wasn't right to read it, it wasn't meant for anyone, but especially not Drift, to read this intimate wish, these last words. He sat for a long moment, the petal in his open palm, Wing in the open pod, before he took a deep breath, sucking in the still air of the shuttle to steel himself, before he read.  
  
And read.  
  
All of them, aloud, to make the words real to his hearing as well as his sight, to redouble the weight of the words. He read, his voice crackling, his spark breaking over and over, the words sometimes swimming before his optics. each one, every one, laying them reverently aside, as though excavating Wing, shape by shape, microgram by microgram. He read slowly, stumbling over the words. He'd never been much of a reader; he'd never felt the pleasure Wing had shown back in Crystal City, curled around his text reader. Words always came hard, but Drift pushed through. It was part of his atonement. It was part of what he owed. It felt sacred, as much as it felt like penance, like the weight lifted off of Wing and onto Drift, every last atom of the pain he had caused.  
  
He couldn't cry. He wanted to cry, but even when he'd read the last of the silver-grey leaves, he couldn't. He felt swollen, massive with grief, sorrow and despair and loss too big for his body, but he couldn't find any release, like it was just swimming through him, restless and awful.  
  
Days had passed, but days didn't matter anymore. All that mattered was Wing, here, beauty among all this dirt. And Drift had nothing left to read, no other words to make but those of his own life, and the silence stretched like a hungry maw, threatening to swallow them both.

"You..died," he said, tasting the words, hoping they would be the sharp needle to pierce the skin of his grief. "You died. To save me." Still nothing. Still not enough, though the grief seemed to well higher.  
  
But Drift had started now, and couldn't stop, and the words began tumbling out of him. How Dai Atlas had asked him to stay, and why he couldn't. It had felt right then, a moment of clarity under Theophany's bright suns. the blinding press of knowing he hadn't earned peace, not just yet. And then the Autobots, the Wreckers, Earth, another flash of brightness quickly squelched by the Swarm's ruination devouring Cybertron. All of it, all his attempts to earn worth, gain redemption: losing Kup, the first mech who'd given him a chance after Wing, but as unlike Wing as you could imagine, and Kup's death. And D-Void, and the horror and pain of realizing that there was something in his coding, something in his core programs, that connected him to the Decepticons still.  
  
He'd wanted to die, then, under the burning wreck of Cybertron, when he'd felt himself turn against Hot Rod and the others. He'd wanted to die, in shame, for having turned on his friends, for being too weak; he'd wanted to die on his own terms, as a hero, or at least in trying to be one.  
  
His optics burned, his hands tying themselves into knots, falling silent for a long moment, mouth twisting with an emotion he couldn't name. And Wing lay still, impassive, and Drift was still unworthy.  
  
So he kept going, as though this was a confession, as though clearing his spirit could mean anything, as though words could make up for the awful things his hands had done. He kept going through the _Lost Light_ , Theophany again, Delphi, every last detail and each word began to feel less like a confession than a grave, as though each of his words was a blackened charred version of the leaf petals Wing had been buried in, his own words memorializing him.  
  
No one else would, he figured. So he kept going, until all the words ran out, until there was nothing left to say, until history had spooled itself out to now and here and Wing lying dead before him, more loved in death than Drift had ever been alive. And there was one thing left to say, in the end. One last thing, one final confession.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
Of all the words, those were the hardest--not even the shame of Overlord was as hard to say, to admit. The words belled in his throat, hanging in the air as though caught between the molecules. I'm sorry. Drift couldn't even go beyond that, couldn't even think of asking for forgiveness he knew he didn't deserve.  
  
But those two words broke something loose inside him. A small crack, not a tidal wave, a trickle, barely perceptible at first like the way a joint will shift and settle. But it grew, it built up, and the pressure of grief began pushing through, and Drift found himself on his knees, hands, face buried in the mound of steel petals, sobbing with a sound that felt like it should tear the world apart.  
  
It was tearing Drift apart, his spark an agony of emotion, his hands clutching at the slips of metal, shoulders wrenching, wracked with the pain that poured out of him: millennia of loss and loneliness.  
  
He felt a touch on the backs of his hands, at first a gossamer float of gentle warmth, like a glow of sunlight, and at first he thought it was just part of it, his hands overstressed by the tension he was pushing into them, or the price of squeezing shut some of those thin metal wishes. But it persisted, and a glow entered his vision, and he looked up, slowly, fearfully, wanting and afraid of knowing who stood above him, whose hands laid warm and soft over his.  
  
Wing. But not Wing. Not solid, not whole, but a diaphanous glow, a shimmer as though too bright for this place, this gaze. Drift could feel emotion pulsing off the figure, a sorrow almost in tune with his own, a sweet painful harmony.  
  
"I never meant to cause you sorrow," Wing said, and the voice was just the same as Drift remembered, pure and kind and strong, even here, even now. Wing's voice had faded from his memory over the years, and he'd become only snatches of sunlight to Drift: a momentary flash of memory, nothing clear and stable, as though he deserved nothing greater than these tantalizing glimpses. But here, now, he could look and hear and Wing's image didn't flash away, and Wing's voice called Drift back to him.  
  
"You didn't," Drift said. But Wing had. But Wing hadn't--the sorrow was all Drift's for his mistakes, for his inability to see beauty scattered before him, peace and welcome laid at his feet.  
  
"I did," Wing said, tugging on Drift's hands, inviting him to rise from his knees. "And I'm sorry."  
  
"No....," The word was scarcely a breath. He didn't want Wing to be sorry. Wing should be happy, Wing should live in a realm that was pure joy, a bright endless sunny sky to fly through, racing from bliss to bliss.  
  
Wing's mouth curved, like sun on the ocean, and one of his hands left Drift's to brush Drift's cheek. "Forgive me," Wing said, and the mouth seemed to quiver, a drop of dew on a flower's most precious petal.  
  
It was almost ludicrous, Wing asking Drift for forgiveness, and Drift's own lips quirked at the absurdity of it all, but Wing stood, patient, wanting an answer. "Always," Drift said, "Though there's nothing to forgive." Even as he said it, he knew there had been a time when he had felt differently. In Crystal City, he'd blamed his stay there on Wing, even blamed the jet for saving his life, for rescuing him from Braid and his slaver thugs. It was bleakly funny, blackly ridiculous, but even as he fought the bitter laugh that threatened his throat, he felt something fall away, something break inside him, some old would start to heal.  
  
He wanted to ask Wing to forgive him, beg, howl for forgiveness, find some way to make his case that he'd changed, he'd gotten better, he'd deserved absolution but he'd already spilled his life at Wing's feet, every word, every moment, and it had led him here, alone. There was no redemption in all those words. It was all he could do to turn imploring optics to Wing, to face the bright gold suns of Wing's own gaze, to see the sad-tempered smile glimmer on the jet's lips, as though Wing knew anyway, Wing heard the plea he knew was too futile to bring to words.  
  
And the ghostly arms folded around him, the sunlight glow of Wing's body enfolding him, warming him through, dancing even over the scarred, battered casing of his spark. Drift didn't have to face Wing's face, only let the warmth and kindness melt against him, forgiveness granted without being asked, without being deserved.  
  
"You're always too hard on yourself," Wing's voice was like honey in his audio, sweet words Drift knew had to be real because in a million years he couldn't dream this. The words lilted with a fondness, and then Wing tilted back, just enough to see Drift's face. "You want a challenge. You always want to feel like you deserved something."  
  
Drift nodded, mute, helpless, wanting to stay like this forever, as long as possible, to hold this memory of Wing, solid and stable and real, against all those flittering fragments of the past.  
  
Wing nodded back, wiser than Drift remembered, and the smile took that teasing, taunting, almost smirking edge that seemed to slice like a scimitar into Drift's spark. "All right," Wing said. "For your penance, then." Drift felt himself almost tremble, half eager, half afraid, wanting a chance to earn some peace, and feeling himself unworthy. "For your penance, Drift, you must," he leaned closer, pulling Drift back into that warm soft glow of him, "love yourself as I do."  
  
Drift felt tears threaten, spark squeezed by the weight of it. Almost impossible, it felt, but even he could sense the justness in it. He nodded, clinging to Wing's ghost, taking the weight of that penance, as if it was the only real thing in the universe.  
  
He woke, later, hours, days, he didn't know. He woke, amidst a swirl of steel petals, like frozen tears, his spark aching but new. He was alone: Wing was gone. Like all true beauty, it could only last a moment, it couldn't be frozen, kept. But he steeled himself to his new task, knowing it was real and true the way so few things in his life had been. And he rose, petals scattering around him, his gaze turning to Wing, where he lay in his pod, still and serene, even empty, even in death, and Wing's fingers had shifted from their position of prayer, fallen in a way that could not be coincidence, fallen to the shapes in the language of hands that said, "Thank you."  
  
More words Drift didn't deserve, but these galvanized him with his promise. He would earn them, earn their meaning, and the next time he saw Wing, when they both were ghosts, free of this life and its scattering of mistakes and missed chances, he would say those same words, face to face, at last, forever.


End file.
